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Image: Russian proton rocket

Science News

Month in Space: March 2012

/ 22 PHOTOS
Image: Russian proton rocket

Partners in space

A Russian Proton rocket carrying a US Intelsat-22 satellite blasts off from Kazakhstan's Russian-leased Baikonur cosmodrome on March 25. Intelsat 22 is a new satellite built by Boeing Space Systems for the Intelsat Corp.

AFP
Image: Winners of the Red Bull Flugtag competition experience zero gravity conditions in a cosmonaut training plane above Moscow

Weightless winners

Winners of the annual Red Bull Flugtag competition experience zero-gravity conditions during a flight in a cosmonaut training plane above the Moscow region on March 1. The flight was a prize awarded to the winners of last summer's competition, which required contestants to design, build and fly home-built aircraft.

Sergei Remezov / X01624
Image: NASA MoonKAM system image of the far side of the lunar surface, with Earth in the background

Hello, world

This image of the far side of the lunar surface, with Earth peeking up from the horizon, was taken by the MoonKAM system onboard the NASA GRAIL mission's Ebb spacecraft on March 17 and released on March 23. A little more than halfway up and on the left side of the image is the crater De Forest. The image is one of a set of pictures requested by students at Emily Dickinson Elementary School in Montana as part of the MoonKAM educational program.

Handout / X80001
Image: The Aurora Australis is seen in this handout picture taken on board the International Space Station between Antarctica and Australia

Aurora from above

The southern lights glow green in a picture taken by Dutch astronaut Andre Kuipers on board the International Space Station between Antarctica and Australia on March 10. The station's lab modules and solar panels can be seen along the upper and right edges of the image.

Nasa / X00653
Image:

Heavenly lights

Jonina Oskarsdottir captured this picture of the northern lights on March 8 over Faskrudsfjordur, Iceland. "No words can describe the experience of the northern lights tonight," Oskarsdottir told SpaceWeather.com. She used a Canon EOS 5D Mark II camera to take the shot, with a Canon 14mm f/2.8L USM II lens set for ISO 1600 ... and a 1-second exposure.

Image: e Kamchatka peninsula in Russia,

Spirals in the sea

Spectacular spirals of ice form in the sea surrounding Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, in a picture taken by Dutch astronaut Andre Kuipers from the International Space Station on March 15.

André Kuipers
Image: BESTPIX - Red Bull Stratos Project

One giant leap

Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner stands at the threshold of a balloon-borne capsule just before a test jump from a height of 71,500 feet. The successful test was conducted on March 15 over Roswell, N.M., in preparation for Baumgartner's planned supersonic jump from 120,000 feet. That feat would break a 52-year-old record for the highest parachute jump.

Jay Nemeth / Getty Images North America

Five-rocket fireworks

A time-lapse photo shows the ascent of five suborbital sounding rockets from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on March 27. The launches were part of the Anomalous Transport Rocket Experiment, or ATREX, which was aimed at tracking high-altitude winds in the jet stream. The fiery display was visible along the East Coast from upstate New York and Massachusetts to North Carolina.

Image: Orion's rainbow of infrared light

Infrared rainbow

A false-color infrared image, released March 12, shows fledgling stars hidden among the gas and clouds of the Orion Nebula. The colors indicate different infrared wavelengths as detected by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's Herschel telescope.

Nasa/Esa/Jpl-Caltech/Iram / Hand / NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech/IRAM
Image: ASA astronauts and industry experts check out the crew accommodations in SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft.

Enter the Dragon

NASA astronauts and industry experts check out the crew accommodations in SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft. On top, from left, are NASA Crew Survival Engineering Team Lead Dustin Gohmert, NASA astronauts Tony Antonelli and Lee Archambault, and SpaceX Mission Operations Engineer Laura Crabtree. On bottom, from left, are SpaceX Thermal Engineer Brenda Hernandez and NASA astronauts Rex Walheim and Tim Kopra. The Dragon is being developed for NASA's use as a cargo carrier as well as a crew vehicle.

Image: una 17, the lander that carried the Lunokhod 1

Looking down at Luna

This picture from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, released March 14, shows Luna 17, the Soviet lander that carried the Lunokhod 1 rover to the surface in 1970. The debarking ramps for the rover are visible extending down to the surface to the right. Many rover tracks are visible around the lander. The inset picture provides a closeup look at Luna 17.

Image: crater in Arabia Terra

The eye of Mars

Radially oriented slope streaks paint stripes on the sides of this Martian crater in Arabia Terra. Slope streaks are common features on steep slopes in Mars' dusty terrain, but this crater is a particularly dramatic example. The picture was taken by the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and released on March 7.

Image: solar eclipse

Eclipse in space

The moon came between NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite and the sun, seen here in extreme ultraviolet light, on Feb. 28. SDO observed the partial solar eclipse for 1 hour and 41 minutes.

Image: Robonaut 2

Greetings from Robonaut

This fisheye-lens image, provided by NASA on March 13, shows the Robonaut 2 humanoid robot during a system checkout in the Destiny laboratory of the International Space Station. Teams on the ground commanded Robonaut through a series of dexterity tests as it spelled out "Hello World" in sign language.

AFP
Image: Saturn

Big and small moons

Ice-covered Enceladus, a 300-mile-wide Saturnian moon, is dwarfed by 3,200-mile-wide Titan as well as the giant planet's rings in this March 12 picture from the Cassini orbiter. Titan, Saturn's largest moon, is covered by a brownish hydrocarbon-rich haze.

Image:

Fruits ... in ... space!

Dutch astronaut Andre Kuipers clowns around with some zero-gravity fruit in the International Space Station's Unity node on Feb. 3.

Image: Cygnus Loop Nebula,

Ghostly nebula

Wispy tendrils of hot dust and gas are aglow in this ultraviolet image of the Cygnus Loop Nebula, taken by NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer and released March 22. The nebula, which lies about 1,500 light-years from Earth, is a supernova remnant left over from a massive stellar explosion that occurred 5,000 to 8,000 years earlier. The Cygnus Loop extends more than three times the size of the full moon in the night sky, and is tucked next to one of the wings of the "swan" in the constellation of Cygnus.

Nasa/Jpl-Caltech / AFP
Image: orthern high latitudes of Mercury

Mercury in perspective

This color-coded perspective view shows elevations in the ancient volcanic plains that lie the northern high latitudes of Mercury, as revealed by NASA's Messenger spacecraft. Purple colors are low and white is high, spanning a vertical range of about 1.4 miles (2.3 kilometers).

Stirring sight

After a nearly ice-free winter, Lake Erie was filled with swirls of suspended sediment and algae on March 21. This view from NASA's Terra satellite shows swirls of sediment-rich water in the lake. As the shallowest of the Great Lakes, Erie’s bottom can be stirred up by strong spring winds and the currents they generate.

Jeff Schmaltz
Image: Towering dust devil casting a serpentine shadow over the Martian surface

Dust devil caught on camera

A towering dust devil casts a serpentine shadow on the Martian surface in this image, acquired by the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and released on March 7. Such whirlwinds often spin through the Martian landscape - but they're not often caught on camera.

AFP
Image: Dubai

Dubai's lights at night

The city lights of Dubai sparkle at night in this photograph taken from the International Space Station on Feb. 22. Dubai is a popular photographic target for the space station's astronauts because of the artificial archipelagos that are located just offshore in the Persian Gulf. The palm-tree-shaped cluster of lights at bottom right is the Palm Jumeira complex, which is still under development. Isolated areas of blurred city lights are due to patchy clouds.

NASA
Image:Venus and Jupiter

Celestial lanterns

Two of the brightest planets in the night sky went through a series of conjunctions during late February and March. Jupiter is on the left and Venus is on the right in this picture, taken by Marek Nikodem of Szubin, Poland, at nightfall on March 12. "They are like two lanterns illuminating the darkness," Nikodem told SpaceWeather.com. "It's a wonderful sight."

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